Review: Sony’s VAIO Flip 13 dies the death of a thousand cuts

Pen input is a great feature, but the complete package is better on paper than in person.

Keyboard, trackpad, and camera

Enlarge/ The backlit keyboard. The key above it is the VAIO Assist button, which can be used to launch Sony’s diagnostic and recovery tools.

Andrew Cunningham

The Flip 13’s keyboard isn’t the best chiclet keyboard we’ve ever used in a high-end Ultrabook (we’d put Apple and Asus at the top of the list, with Dell and Lenovo roughly tied for second place), but it’s still a respectable offering. The layout is good and the nice, even backlight is exemplary, but travel is shallower and less clicky than it is in the best of Ultrabook keyboards. The flexing that you’ll notice through the body of the laptop is also evident here, and the keyboard and the area around it will move and bend slightly under the pressure of your fingers. It’s nothing you can’t get used to, but it’s not what we like to see in a system that costs this much.

The trackpad falls into the same camp—it’s reasonably accurate but occasionally jumpy and sometimes prone to mis-interpreting gestures. The trackpad is also a little flimsy and a little shallow, things that don’t really interfere with its operation but do make it less satisfying to use.

Finally, while convertibles don’t make great dedicated tablets, Sony sees the Flip 13 as enough of a tablet to include an 8MP webcam on the bottom of the thing to be used while the laptop is in tablet mode. We compared it briefly to the iPad 4—its pictures are a little darker and noisier, though in good light they should be suitable for Facebook. In any event, if you’ve got a mid-to-high-end smartphone from the last year or two, you’ll usually get better pictures out of it than the Flip.

The rest of the Flip 13’s internals are fairly run-of-the-mill for an Ultrabook. It sports either 4GB or 8GB of RAM (soldered to the motherboard, so upgrade when you buy it if you think you’ll ever want it). Solid state drives are standard in the 13-inch model and can come in either SATA or higher-performing PCI Express solutions like what we saw in the 2013 MacBook Air. Our review unit came with a 128GB drive from Toshiba (part number THNSNH128G8NT), and 256GB and 512GB options are available in both SATA and PCIe flavors. Dual-band 802.11n is also standard courtesy of Intel’s Wireless-N 7260 card, which combined two two-way Wi-Fi streams for a theoretical maximum throughput of 300Mbps. An 802.11ac upgrade supporting 867Mbps speeds is available as an option as well.

Of the 128GB drive on our review unit, about 60GB was free on the system partition—40GB or so had been consumed by the OS and the swap and hibernation files, and another 20 are used up by various system and recovery partitions. You can delete and reclaim the main 17GB recovery partition pretty easily if you want, just be prepared to reinstall Windows yourself if anything goes south.

Finally, given the disappointing 802.11ac speeds we saw in the Haswell XPS 12, we decided to run a quick iPerf networking throughput test with the VAIO Flip to see where its 802.11n adapter landed. Both computers are using Wi-Fi adapters from Intel, though of course 802.11ac should be faster than 802.11n and the two laptops will differ in their antenna configurations.

The Flip 13 turns in reasonable real-world scores for a 300Mbps 802.11n laptop—it actually does better than the 802.11ac adapter in the XPS 12 when 10 feet away from our 802.11ac router, though the XPS 12’s signal dropped off less sharply when we moved the laptop farther away. Though we were using the latest drivers from Intel for the XPS 12’s 802.11ac adapter, it seems like there must be either a driver-related problem or perhaps some sort of miscommunication between the AirPort and the adapter. We’ll do some more digging on this subject and report back if we find anything conclusive.

Battery life

In our Wi-Fi browsing test, which loads a set of pages in a continuous loop until the battery dies with the screen set to 50 percent brightness, the VAIO Flip 13 lasted for six hours 49 minutes. This is around an hour less than the Haswell XPS 12 and 20 minutes less than Acer’s Haswell version of the Aspire S7. It’s disappointing that none of the Haswell PCs we’ve seen have been able to touch the 12-to-13 hours of battery life offered up by the new MacBook Airs, but it’s nice to see that seven-to-eight hours represents the new “normal” for Haswell Ultrabooks. Ivy Bridge models commonly gave us six hours or less.

Conclusions

The VAIO Flip 13 is one of those PCs that dies a death of a thousand cuts—it isn’t done in by any one gigantic flaw but a list of minor ones. It looks good on paper. It even looks good in person, but the flexing case, the screen that lifts the body of the laptop from your desk, the somewhat grainy quality of the screen, and the fan noise are all just annoying enough in aggregate to keep the Flip 13 out of the top tier of convertibles.

There’s still plenty to recommend here. The digitizer is a big plus for fans of pen input, and we like the full-size palmrest and trackpad of the Flip 13 more than we like the ones included in the pen-centric VAIO Duo 13. The build quality isn’t bad, the keyboard and trackpad are reasonably good, and the convertible mechanism doesn’t keep it from doing its job as a laptop. If there’s any one feature in the Flip that you like, its flaws are tolerable. There are just a few too many small deficiencies to make it a better all-round convertible than the XPS 12 or Lenovo’s Yoga lineup.

The good

Attractive styling

Full-size keyboard and trackpad that aren’t sacrificed on the altar of convertibility

Haswell delivers solid performance

Reasonable (but not exceptional) battery life

Digitizer that’s compatible with Sony’s existing VAIO pen accessories

The bad

Despite aluminum and plastic construction, the laptop is overly flexible throughout

Screen is bright and colorful, but slightly grainy

Lid lifts computer off of the surface it’s on while open, and the hard plastic standoffs make the laptop less stable on a hard table or desk

The ugly

Fan spins up with very little provocation, making the Flip noisier than most competing Ultrabooks

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.